The Arabic Language

17.3 Arabic in Africa
Arabic as a mother tongue is widespread in Africa not only in the Maghreb 
and Egypt, but also in the sub-Saharan areas and in East Africa. Leaving aside 
the special case of Nubi in Uganda and Kenya (see Chapter 16), Arabic is the 
native language of many people in Sudan and Chad, and of sizeable minorities 
in Nigeria (see Chapter 15, p. 288) and Niger. Even in those areas where Arabic 

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The Arabic Language
never replaced the indigenous languages, it left behind a substantial heritage 
through the trading networks that the Arabs established all over the continent. 
The expansion of Islam brought many of the cultures in the northern half of the 
continent under the Islamic sphere of influence, which resulted in hundreds of 
loanwords in the domains of religion, culture and science.
The main expansion of Islam and Arabic in Africa took place along two routes of 
exploration and exploitation. One route followed the Nile to the Sudan, and from 
there went westwards along the savannah belt between the Sahara Desert and the 
forest, through the region known by the Arabs as the 
bilād as-Sūdān
‘land of the 
Blacks’. The other route followed the Saharan trails to the south. The expansion 
of the Arabs along the savannah belt brought them in touch with Hausa-speaking 
people. Hausa, commonly regarded as a subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic languages, 
had spread from its main centres in Niger and Nigeria as a 
lingua franca
over large 
parts of Central Africa. The history of the relations between the Arabs and the 
Hausa is reflected in the structure of the Arabic loanwords in their language. In 
the western Sudan, Hausa speakers borrowed from Arabic in the same way as 
speakers of other West African languages; through Hausa these Arabic loanwords 
received an even wider circulation, for instance, in Kanuri, Bambara and Fulfulde. 
In Sudan, a large group of Hausa-speakers lives in an Arabic-speaking environ-
ment. They have become completely bilingual in both languages and their 
language use exhibits extensive code-mixing.
The oldest groups of loans, borrowed in West Africa, is integrated completely 
into the structure of the language, with extensive adaptation to the phonology. 
Arabic /b/ is represented by /f/ (e.g., 
littaafìi
, plural 
lìttàtàafay
‘book’ < Arabic 
kitāb
), most of the velars and pharyngals have disappeared (e.g., 
làabaarìi
, plural 
làabàaruu
‘news’ < Arabic plural 
ʾaḫbār
; 
maalàmii
, plural 
maalàmaa
‘learned man’ < 
Arabic 
muʿallim
). The examples given here also demonstrate that the early loans 
from Arabic almost always contain the Arabic article and have been provided 
with a Hausa plural. Recent loans from Arabic in West African Hausa are all in 
the domain of religion or Islamic sciences and represent a much closer approxi
-
mation of the original form, for instance, 
nahawù
‘grammar’ (< Arabic 
naḥw
). If 
they contain an Arabic article, it has the form 
ʾal
instead of colloquial 
il-
, 
l-
, 
li-
, for 
example, 
àḷaadàa
‘custom’ (< Arabic 
ʿāda
), 
àlhajìi
‘pilgrim’ (< Arabic 
ḥājj
), 
àlbarkàa
‘blessing’ (< Arabic 
baraka
). There is a tendency among religious learned men to 
pronounce even the older loans in an Arabicised way, for instance, by replacing 
/d/ deriving from Arabic /ḏ/ with /z/. Most of the Arabic loans in Hausa are 
substantives, but there are also a few Arabic conjunctions, such as